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Never tease an old dog, it may have one bite left.

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Want a daughter with blond hair, green eyes and pale skin?

A Los Angeles clinic says it will soon help couples select both gender and physical traits in a baby when they undergo a form of fertility treatment. The clinic, Fertility Institutes, says it has received “half a dozen” requests for the service, which is based on a procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD.

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Next step: Sue somebody. Then hire lobbyists.

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“The government” doesn’t. Certain moronic politicians do, because they are both ignorant and stupid, but that doesn’t prevent them from getting elected — they’re “representative” in every sense of the word.

Although the post doesn’t mention it, Congressman Stupak is (of course) a Democrat.

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I am not making this up.

Megan McArdle is nonplussed.

New York City’s main industry lies in ruins; its finances are in peril; its housing market is falling. What does the city need?  That’s right, tougher rent controls!

In times like this, it’s easy to believe that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.  But here’s one of the things that basically everyone, left to right, agrees on:  rent control is the surest way to destroy a city’s housing stock short of aerial bombing, and one of the major culprits behind New York’s painfully low vacancy rate.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

And I have no problem with that. The problem is that, in actual practice, it would be two million Muslims and Latin Americans, and that is what got us into this mess in the first place.

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How a bottle-blond former waitress and self-described “55-year-old virgin” with a taste for the good life became the financial messiah for millions of Americans might be a fun Lifetime original movie. Why the masses continue to invest their faith in Suze Orman in the wake of a financial meltdown she never saw coming is a more timely question. The answer is complicated.

Savor the irony of a writer for Slate magazine complaining that someone else doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

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A young woman has been saved from a forced marriage in Pakistan after British police used new powers to restrain her father.

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Hey, money is money.

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Oh, I don’t want to beam down with the Captain

‘Cause the Captain beams up alone….

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So, in sum, Amazon doesn’t ship any Kindles during the Christmas season, but they do accept orders and build demand. They (i) turn just having the ability to buy their product into ‘good customer service,’ (ii) don’t have to worry about throwing a bone to the early adopters and (iii) don’t have to deal with any excess inventory on the original Kindle because by the time people know about the Kindle 2, no one who owns a Kindle 1 would fall into the return window time frame.

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Crowdsourcing law enforcement — which depends, of course, on the public cooperating.

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Your future under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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This reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about “the machine that goes ping!“, where a pregnant lady in a delivery theater, when she asks “What should I do?”, is patted on the head by a doctor and told “Nothing, dear; you’re not qualified.”

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Massachusetts.

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They ought never to have allowed these people to remain in place this long.

Another mistake by Bush, who campaigned for Specter during the last election.

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The decision was made last week after California Rep. Barbara Lee, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Hispanic groups complained to the White House that Judd Gregg, the Republican senator from New Hampshire slated to head Commerce, couldn’t be trusted to conduct a complete Census. The National Association of Latino Officials said it had “serious questions about his willingness to ensure that the 2010 Census produces the most accurate possible count.”

Mr. Chapman worries about a revival of the effort led by minority groups after the 2000 Census to adjust the totals for states and cities using statistical sampling and computer models. In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Department of Commerce v. U.S. House that sampling could not be used to reapportion congressional seats. But it left open the possibility that sampling could be used to redraw political boundaries within the states.

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TANF has been a remarkable success. Welfare caseloads nationally fell from 12.6 million in 1997 to fewer than five million in 2007. And yet despite this achievement, House Democrats are seeking to undo Mr. Clinton’s reforms under the cover of the stimulus bill.

Steve Sailer doesn’t quite say “you can’t make this stuff up”, but he doesn’t have to.

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The problem with such huge piles of excrement legislation is that (a) nobody has (or can) read the whole thing, and (b) the Bad Guys take advantage of the complexity of the process to sneak in little goodies that advance their own (or their owners’) agenda. The health care provisions that Megan at Fox News was all over this morning (and that Rush Limbaugh has been all over for the past two days) are one such instance: Nobody knows how it got into the bill, or who put it there, or what it would mean in practice. This is another such instance, fortunately with some fairly obvious fingerprints on it.

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A white person getting a tattoo is a major step in their life as it presupposes that their taste at this given moment is good enough to sustain them for the rest of their lives.  Needless to say, this is a near impossible task.  This is why you don’t see a lot of white people with R.E.M. or Strokes tattoos.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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And join in. Any number can play. (Why not? They’re spending YOUR money on THEIR pet projects.)

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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All of whom were registered as Democrats by ACORN.

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The general didn’t get much time. After a long, controversial career, Brig. Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñones retired from active duty last month and moved to this Caribbean playground to work for the Cancun mayor and fight the drug cartels that have penetrated much of Mexican society. He lasted a week.

Tello, 63, along with his bodyguard and a driver, were kidnapped in downtown Cancun last Monday evening, taken to a hidden location, methodically tortured, then driven out to the jungle and shot in the head. Their bodies were found Tuesday in the cab of a pickup truck on the side of a highway leading out of town. An autopsy revealed that both the general’s arms and legs had been broken.

Where is Zorro when you really need him?

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(The Financial Times is the British equivalent of the Wall Street Journal — if the Wall Street Journal were run by the staff of The Nation.)

Citing Keynes gives us special licence to talk economics without using any. To paraphrase the lawyers’ dictum, when the facts are on our side, we pound the facts; when theory is on our side, we pound theory; and when neither the facts nor theory are on our side, we pound Keynes – and to great effect.

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Health-care resources are not unlimited in any country, even rich ones like Canada and the U.S., and must be rationed either by price or time. When individuals bear no direct responsibility for paying for their care, as in Canada, that care is rationed by waiting.

In Ontario, Lindsay McCreith was suffering from headaches and seizures yet faced a four and a half month wait for an MRI scan in January of 2006. Deciding that the wait was untenable, Mr. McCreith did what a lot of Canadians do: He went south, and paid for an MRI scan across the border in Buffalo. The MRI revealed a malignant brain tumor.

Ontario’s government system still refused to provide timely treatment, offering instead a months-long wait for surgery. In the end, Mr. McCreith returned to Buffalo and paid for surgery that may have saved his life.

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Hint: Probably not.

Treasury, so far, has refused to tell us where much of the money went, beyond paying for pricey canapés and comfy beds. Not surprisingly, Fox Business Network ran a half-page ad in USA Today on February 3 to announce that they “sued the Treasury and the Federal Reserve” to find out where the TARP and FRB-NY money went. The Senate is considering subpoenas to get Treasury to tell them where it all went. Talk about imperial government!

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THE comment from the photographer at Sears was typical. “Are these all yours?” she asked, surveying Kim Gunnip’s 12 children.

“No,” Mrs. Gunnip replied, “I picked some up at the food court.”

Note that this is in the “Fashion & Style” section of the New York Times. For readers of the Times, kids are a fashion statement.

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This could be huge.

A lensless microscope is “just eminently practical,” says Kate Bechtel, a senior scientist at research and development firm Triple Ring Technologies. “There’s no complicated equipment that requires, you know, three Ph.D.s to operate or maintain. This may actually prove to be a paradigm shift in the way microscopy is done for many applications.”

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Wells saw no difference between communism and fascism and Goldberg puts a compelling case that neither should we. Mussolini began as a socialist agitator. The Nazis were a national socialist party which despised bourgeois democracy and offered a comprehensive welfare state.

And this appears in the most left-wing major newspaper in Britain. Go figure.

Steve Sailer has some fun with a Great Metropolitan Newspaper that believes a fellow whose father is Jewish and mother is Korean is a “white supremacist”.

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In S.M. Stirling’s Draka books, the Citizen class don’t bear their own children, but rather have serf host-mothers do it, and the host-mother is retained as the child’s nanny until it goes off to school. Serfs are, of course, typically non-white. Perhaps we’re gradually backing into this system.

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Steve Sailer digs up an inconvenient truth.

After I reported yesterday that Bill Gates had given $1 million in 2001 to long-time Weatherman fugitive Rick Ayers (brother of President Obama’s extremely distant acquaintance Bill Ayers) to start “small learning communities” within Berkeley High to, among other things, take students to Cuba to study “social justice,” a reader who graduated from Berkeley High in the 1970s reported that the exact same idea had already been tried way back when the Ayers brothers were making bombs instead of agitating for “small schools.”

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Google says that Latitude is a new way to keep in touch with people, but it’s not as if there is a gap in the market for this. If I want to keep in touch with people, I could email them or find them on Facebook or follow their tweets on Twitter or – and here’s something for the good people at Google to get their clever heads around – I could call them up and ask them where they are. Indeed, if somebody created some sort of technology that allowed me to keep out of touch with people, I might kiss their face.

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For the first time, the General Teaching Council for England – the profession’s regulator – wants staff in the independent sector to be subjected to the same code as those in state schools.

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All of them run by Democrats. Fancy that.

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For an alleged genius, Bill Gates can be pretty stupid at times.

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Steve Sailer is always worth reading. This is especially sharp.

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I don’t know where Wally finds these things; it’s a gift.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.